Fiction

Letters in Canada 1975 In this issue of Letters in Canada, the last to appear under the present editors, three important names are missing. M. Jean-Charles Bonenfant, one of our most faithful contributors, has found himself obliged for reasons of health to withdraw as reviewer in charge of the section entitled 'Etudes sociales.' We are deeply grateful for his long and punctual service on a wide variety of subjects. In the section devoted to 'Poesie,' M. Jacques Blais, after providing distinguished reviews for the past three years, has been succeeded by M. Rene Dionne. Finally, Professor Willard G. Oxtoby, on sabbatical leave in India, is temporarily absent from these pages, but will resume his responsibilities as reviewer of books on 'Religion' next year. (DMH) FICTION The baffling problem of how to cope with the increasing number of pieces of fiction that emerge each successive year cannot be resolved easily, but it does tend to have its compensations. Insofar as one has the privilege of surveying the total output, one can try to detect patterns, family groups, and make the kind of observations that the context of a multitude of books allows. One such obvious observation is that Canadian fiction has come of age, at least in the mundane sense of providing for most readers' tastes. And this is done as well at a number of levels, so that one can find the same subjects, the same preoccupations, and even the same narrative germs or ideas handled and deployed through a variety of sensibilities and skills. As far as the family groupings go, it is always interesting to note how, in what must be a coincidental concurrence , there emerge perceptible groupings. One year will demonstrate a great number of beginnings, so that first novels seem to characterize the major energies of fiction at that given time. When we turn to a year like this past one, however, it is not so much beginnings as the sense of rounding off and retrospect and consolidation that occur as the most striking phenomena. The one most signal example of this would of course be Morley Callaghan'S A Fine and Private Place (Macmillan, 213, $9.95) which has FICTION 315 taken close to two decades in its projection and completion. It must have been five years ago that a sampler of this novel, long in the making, was offered up at least in one of its parts. The full fiction demonstrates a much greater richness than the original fragment had indicated. At that time the projected novel seemed to have preoccupied itself with questions of passion, involving largely a young couple, who in their turn were involved with rather peripheral questions of art and culture. The heroine had connections with the CBC and her companion pursuits in graduate English. At the edge there was the presence of a writer, who even then gave signs of strongly resembling his author, but without the complexities of self-portraiture and self-distancing that the full novel deploys. As a finished novel A Fine and Private Place can well stand as a tentative summary of the moral and historical preoccupations that Callaghan has introduced into his fiction as a perceptible current. We have the looming question of society and its criminality, of society and its quest for innocence, and how both of these resolve themselves through the crucible of a sensibility in an imagined world. To prevent the result from sounding as bleak and high falutin as it must in these few words of review, there are the ironies that play over the retrospect, compounded as it is of the author's recollection, the author's reflection on such recollection , and his attitude to it as it emerges through his fictional persona. There is also the unmistakable grace of a voice that has occurred in a number of places and times but without losing its particular flavour. The novel has a kind of cumulative effect, and yet avoids providing any unnecessary feel of epitaph or palinode. All in all it serves to demonstrate the sureness and 'terrible alertness' that would threaten to slip over into myth if it were not so resolutely avoided by the palpable feel...